Lenders have asked court permission to seize the Homesteads at Newtown, an assisted-living center for seniors that caters to residents with Alzheimer”™s disease.
Guaranty Financial Group Inc. has called in a $10.7 million loan on the property made  in 2005, and the Dallas-based bank also demanded immediate payment on a $19 million mortgage on Kensington Green Assisted Living and Memory Care in Southbury.
Guaranty Financial is asking for an unspecified amount of damages, as well as a court-ordered attachment on future rent payments made by residents of the assisted-living center. According to a study published this summer by Prudential Financial, suites in Connecticut assisted-living centers cost $62,000 on average, the fourth highest rate in the nation.
The Newtown and Southbury facilities are owned by Sunwest Management Inc., a Salem, Ore.-based company that owns three more centers in Connecticut among 280 nationally. The company is the fourth largest manager of assisted-living housing in the nation, according to the Assisted Living Federation of America.
The Homesteads at Newtown is at 166 Mount Pleasant Road, which is part of Route 6. The parent company targeted 280 units for the facility, which would make it by far the largest senior residential community in Newtown, ahead of Ashlar at Newtown at 139 Toddy Hill Road.
Sunwest”™s chief financial officer recently testified in Oregon state court that the company can no longer pay its bills on a third of the company”™s properties, according to a report this month in the Register-Guard, a newspaper in Eugene, Ore. The CFO reportedly testified that the privately held company owes $1.8 billion in debt, including $300 million owed the GE Healthcare division of Fairfield-based General Electric Co.
Senior care centers often operate on a shoestring budget ”“ in upstate New York, an assisted-living center called Appleridge Retirement Community Inc. filed for bankruptcy protection from creditors last month, unable to make ends meet on its communities in Rochester and Horseheads.
Connecticut is still dealing with the collapse of Haven Healthcare, which operated 15 nursing homes in the state, none in Fairfield County. Last month a state-appointed overseer recommended that a Haven Healthcare home in Waterford be closed after the vacancy rate approached 50 percent.
Haven Healthcare”™s remaining facilities garnered recapitalizations from a trio of private investors, however, including Omega Healthcare Investors Inc. of Timonium, Md., which purchased a $39 million mortgage on seven Haven Healthcare facilities from Norwalk-based GE Capital Corp.
In contrast to the woes facing Haven Healthcare and Sunwest, Omega has been the picture of health, generating $34 million in profits in the first half of the year on $85 million in revenue.